Posts by ArguablyShrugs 67 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2023
A friend's dad was making Calvados at home in the kitchen. Somebody apparently screwed on the cap on the PET bottle full of cider and the happily growing and CO2 producing yeast too tightly, and one evening at their place it blew up in my friend's face without any warning. I was facing the other way, thankfully. The whole kitchen got remodelled afterwards…
A full watercooler bottle going off would be… interesting. Probably enough of the sticky sugary stuff to kill all the devices in all the cubicles.
I remember buing some ruggedised 2.5" 80GB drives from Toshiba around two decades ago. Not only had they increased operating altitude limit up to 5 km (it's no fun if your drive crashes when you need to work at an observatory or such), but also an operating temperature from -30 to 80℃ or so.
The spec that stroke me as quite funny was the non‑operating altitude of 12 km – that's well over the *user's* operating altitude...
…still haven't released their detailed 1:25k maps under any Open Government Data licence, unlike almost all other Continental countries' tax‑funded map agencies (the Swiss being a rather fine example, with all of their gov map products available for free for everyone).
> I do feel bad for the habitat he likely destroyed. though
I specifically asked the mountain hut in question, and it said it was really glad it could be of service in killing Nazis.
RIP, you good ole mountain hut. Your deeds and sacrifice will be always remembered! Semper Fi. and all of that...
> I should be able to type out most international characters from letters and symbols I can already find on the keyboard, not have to learn key combinations off-by-heart.
Great. Now please tell me how does that work with several languages as in an international keyboard layout. If compose + o gives you ó, how do you get ö then? I might need both, and quite frequently at that. Or è, é, ę, ě, ñ, ň, ...
The obligatory ACOUP as to why Trump is a fascist, not that it bothers his fascist supporters in any way:
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/
One thing for him, he surely gets the speedrun record of going full fascist – even Hitler himself took a few years!
While in no way any real excuse of the left-pondian electorate being utterly dumb in electing ChiefTwat™ again, they have also been heavily gerrymandered by the Reps in the past decades whenever they held any part of local power. Meaning any US elections simply "democratic" aren't...
Easily. First having been born into some money (it really helps if your Pa is a diamond mining mogul fascist in South Africa), then by joining the C-suite even if others chuck you out of it for being dumb (as did actually happen with him and PayPal – he got fired). Get enough money, you can do anything, including being an apartheid scum fascist.
It explained it all already…
…and it was a perfectly cromulent explanation.
Including the bits about starting a DOS graphical installer from within win 3.1 if one upgraded in place - even if usually not a good idea with windows way back then, but hey :-)
"The mech mut was also eqipped with carbon fire disruptors."
That's a brand name product from CarbonFire, not a generic, in case anybody wondered what "a fire disruptor made our of carbon" is…
Basically an explosive waterjet cutter which cuts through any fusing mechanism faster than said mechanism can initiate.
If he was actually allergic to milk proteins (a very real thing) and not just lactase deficient, it's quite likely he would have been allergic to cow's ova as well. IgE‑mediated bovine serum albumin allergy is often reactive to both the animal's milk and its meat...
Now, enemy combatants, please just lay down in that unmarked van with the NMR bed, and please stay still for 30 minutes. Here, your free earplugs. Oh, and please, do leave any ferromagnetic articles of your clothing outside. No sir, I am afraid that AK‑102 is magnetic, it definitely won't do, please leave that beyond the door with the clear warning sign. Now, just stay still...
Oh, and could you please tell your mates to not shoot at our liquid He superconducting coils, we don't really want a quench here.
Exactly. No robots here. Magnetic nanoparticle targeted drug delivery isn't exactly a totally new thing, IIRC. Even without the nano, as I vaguely remember some surgeries guiding the (macro) effector into the right place by magnetic fields.
Skimming through the abstract (hey, El Reg, can you provide DOI links at the bottom as a standard, please?), it might be argued they are remote‑release delivery nanoparticles, since it seems they use localised EM heating to release the thrombin after guiding to the right place (melting the phase change encapsulation material), so perhaps more like remotely‑controlled UAVs? Still not a nanobot, though.
It's a low cost mission (~$80M?), so it still made some partial sense to try it out even on an untested rocket (which brought the launch costs down even further).
But if it slips to the next or even later windows (and Mars windows aren't plentiful), it might get just totally binned altogether, unfortunately. Any extended clean room storage and team costs don't go well in the current NASA climate, with the congress‑critters' mandated SLS sucking the majority of it. NASA shelved another low cost mission this year after all, not wanting to pay the clean room costs.
Sad. I'd have rather given the team say a just 60% chance of a launch success on the BONG's first flight, than a 90% chance of being binned by the NASA admins next year or the one after because of extended costs (the numbers were pulled out of my arse, but you get the gist of it).
But inevitable – BO wanted to do a hot‑fire test with it aboard (saving integration time), but I guess they or NASA don't really think they could hit the Oct launch window anyway.
"I've got a question about Starliner"
"There's a strange noise coming through the speaker"
"I don't know what's making it."
"Alright Butch, that one came through"
"It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."
Is it going full HAL 9000 or what?
Likely just some glitch in the audio system, but oh my, don't the jokes about Starliner keep writing themselves...
You mean like the small sharp rocks falling from a great height that mountaineering helmets are designed to protect from? Because falling rocks is one of the biggest dangers in mountaineering?
It's not a thin bit of foam. It's the same foam as used in your car's bumper nowadays. Plenty of mountaineering helmets have a hard shell all around the foam as well.
And actually, EN-12492 mountaineering helmets are certified somewhat similarly to EN 397 for penetration.
That includes a 3kg sharp metal spike dropped from 1m for a penetration test. The very same penetration test as done for EN 397 workplace hard hats.
They still wouldn't pass EN 397 or relevant OHSA or similar requirements, as the chin straps aren't designed to be auto‑releasing under a certain small load, as accidental strangulation is much less of a danger if you take a long tumble in the mountains than your helmet snapping off and leaving you unprotected on your next contact with the rock.
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